With critics lining up to praise or castigate the justices, a clear view of the Roberts Court is more important than ever. Only with a broad and even-handed understanding of the Court and its members can we fairly evaluate its decisions. And only by understanding where each justice is coming from, in an open-minded way that can be critical without trapping justices in scorn or stereotype, can we plan for the future.

That’s why I wrote, with Joshua Matz, a book called Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution. Reflecting my decades of experience arguing before the Court and studying the Constitution—and Joshua’s learning as a former Harvard Law Review editor and SCOTUSblogger—Uncertain Justice offers an overview of nearly every major opinion since John G. Roberts, Jr. was confirmed as Chief Justice in 2005. It also provides rich pictures of each justice and a panoramic view of the most important modern trends in American constitutional law.

For far too long the gun lobby has loudly proclaimed that the Constitution bars almost any kind of law aimed at curbing gun violence. But since a string of mass shootings last year culminating in the Newtown mass shooting that took the lives of 20 children, there’s been a growing chorus of voices pushing back against the gun lobby’s platitudes and simplistic, often misleading, interpretation of the Second Amendment.

More than 50 constitutional law scholars signed a letter explaining why the Second Amendment is not absolute or unlimited. Very few of rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution are absolute. One of the scholars who signed that letter is among the nation’s greatest constitutional law scholars -- Laurence H. Tribe, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor.

Hours before President Obama, a former student of Tribe’s, gave his State of the Union Address, Tribe testified before a Senate Judiciary committee examining ways to curb gun violence without trampling the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

In his oral and written testimony Tribe made it clear that efforts to reduce – not eliminate – gun violence through government action are not beyond reach because of the Second Amendment. In current Supreme Court rulings, such as D.C. v. Heller, Tribe explained the justices took certain policy choices off the table for consideration and “thereby cleared the path to reasonable regulations to be enacted without fear that those policy choices would ever open the door to unlimited government control or be imperiled by exaggerated interpretations of the Second Amendment.” (Click picture of Tribe for video of his opening remarks, or see here.)

Tribe noted that Justice Antonin Scalia author of the majority opinion in Heller noted that the court’s interpretation of the “Constitution leaves open a variety of regulatory tools to combating the problem of gun violence in this country.”

In his written testimony, Tribe put it this way: “Proposals to disarm the American people, to leave firearms solely in the hands of the military and the police, have been decisively taken off the table – if they were ever truly on the table – by the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions in 2008 and 2010 [Heller and McDonald v. Chicago respectively].”

The nation's system for upholding the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for indigent criminal defendants is woefully lacking and needs a strong response by federal officials, writes Professor Cara H. Drinan in a recently released ACS Issue Brief.

Drinan, an assistant law professor at Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, says a federal response is needed to shore up the nation's system and cites statements from Attorney General Eric Holder as hope that a robust federal response is forthcoming. Holder, Drinan writes, has said that reforming indigent defense is a top priority of the Department of Justice. She also cites the fact that the administration has created an initiative to reform indigent defense, which is spearheaded by Harvard law professor and constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe.

But Congress must also get involved in the matter. She notes that since the Supreme Court's landmark 1963 opinion, Gideon v. Wainwright, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states have an obligation under the Sixth Amendment to provide legal representation to poor criminal defendants that many states have abdicated those constitutional responsibilities. Indeed, she explains that in 16 states "more than half of the indigent defense costs are paid for by the county; and in two states, Pennsylvania and Utah, there is no state funding at all."